by Roger Chartier:
Do you see this sort of thing? ???????????????
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Do you see question marks and odd symbols when you should see Chinese characters and Chinese text?
You have difficulty reading Chinese on a computer. Chinese characters won't display properly.
In XP be sure that you have "East Asian Fonts" enabled.
Go to your Control panel and find the "Fonts" folder.
Make sure that you have Simsum or Nsimsum as a font.
These are True Type Fonts.
If you need to type in Chinese, then you have to enable multiple input languages.
This will leave a small icon in the toolbar that says EN for English or CH for Chinese. Clicking on these is how you can switch between the two languages for input. Sometimes most sites will display properly, but an app might not or some Flash display will show the ??????? or square boxes in place of Chinese Characters.
And accessing a Chinese mainland website we found that with Vista and Windows 7 and most likely Windows XP our easiest solution was to be sure to enable the Simsum-Nsimsum True Type Fonts in the Fonts folder.
Then the big trick was to go to: Control Panel - Region and language. Then click on the "Location" tab and Click on Format.
Then change the format to Chinese Language (PRC), which is the regional Chinese that we are interested in. Then change the location to China.
There might be another way, but this worked for us. The computer still works for English or Chinese and to type in one language, or the other, simply switch input languages with the language icon in the toolbar.
